


Playing Dead

by zacharybosch



Series: Vampire AU [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (or not dealing with it as the case may be), Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Angst, Betrayal, Bickering, Biting, Blood Drinking, But it is an Ending, Dealing With Trauma, F/F, Firenze | Florence, Illustrations, M/M, Or Is It?, Superpowers, Vampire Turning, Vampire Will Graham, happy ending? sad ending? who knows, more tags to be added as i go..., sharp things far too close to soft things, talking about feelings like adults
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-01-15 17:17:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21256841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacharybosch/pseuds/zacharybosch
Summary: Will left a bloody mess and a torn ear behind him in Baltimore. Where did he go, and what did he take with him? Miriam and Beverly decide to find out.---This is the second part of my vampire AU! With more illustrations! It's a direct sequel to part one, Playing God, so I highly recommend reading that first :)New chapter every Thursday!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> first up, SORRY for the extended wait on this! sometimes real life gets in the way, despite our best efforts to live full-time in fanfic land. 
> 
> this fic picks up the trail left by PLAYING GOD, so please go read that first if you haven't already! for everyone else who's up to speed, please tuck in :)

Hannibal knows pain, and he knew fear, once. What he feels now is not quite akin to either, but shares more in common than it holds in opposition. It’s bizarre, the way he feels so entirely outside of his body, as though he’s floating four feet up in the air and is gazing down upon himself and all his blood on the beautiful marble floor of his entrance foyer.

He can hear great bells ringing, and the low rumble of huge drums, crashing in his ears like the restless roll of the ocean. The colours of his house alternately brighten and fade around him, and everything blurs, until it doesn’t, and becomes sharp, until it’s not.

The earth moves and shakes around him, and he’s in his kitchen, blacking out and coming to over and over again. The butcher block, he’s being butchered over the butcher block just as he’s butchered so many others before him. This can’t all be his blood, surely, there’s so much and it just keeps coming, filling his nose and mouth and ears and lungs, but then it’s only filling one ear because the other one is no longer attached to his head, and was it always like that? Hannibal can’t remember what his body was like, if he ever even had a body to begin with.

Every second stretches for an eternity and it’s like being born, but also dying, but also living, but it’s definitely like dying now because the Devil himself is looming over him, spilling black ichor on his skin, and Hannibal _knew_, he always knew that he would enter Hell as a king in splendor, to be greeted by Lucifer and all the legions of the dead. 

He inclines his head and spreads his hands and takes a graceful step forwards into night.

***

The Santa Maria del Fiore was older than Will by all of twenty-two years, if he counted from the year that construction began. Counting from the year of completion, Will beat it by one hundred and eighteen. Not that it was a competition; indeed, he’d never even had a chance to visit the Duomo over the years, to compare cracks and weathering and general wear-and-tear.

Now that he walked past it on a near daily basis, Will had decided that it was in fact a competition, and that he was most certainly winning. All credit where it was due: the Duomo certainly looked impressive, but it required a huge amount of work to keep it that way, whereas Will remained damn near perfect with only minimal maintenance required.

It was a shame that Hannibal didn’t get to walk beside Will through the streets of Florence; he would’ve enjoyed it, and could even perhaps have been persuaded to admit that the Duomo’s magnificence was nothing compared to Will. 

But it couldn’t be helped. Will had tried to turn him that night in Baltimore, but successfully turning a human was notoriously difficult even under perfect conditions, and given the circumstances at the time it was no wonder that Will had failed. But he would live with the consequences of his failure, just as he had lived for the past seven hundred years; there would be opportunities to begin again, somewhere new, anywhere he wanted. Florence was little more than an indulgence, really. A distraction. Hannibal had spoken of it so often, starry-eyed and staring off into the distance, so it only seemed appropriate that Will see what all the fuss was about. He’d missed the city entirely during the Renaissance, a good portion of which Will had spent in eastern Europe in thrall to the one who turned him. By the time he escaped the clutches of his maker, his taste for Europe had soured considerably, and he boarded a ship bound for the New World and never looked back.

Perhaps he had missed a trick there, in not coming to Florence when it was still the beating heart at the centre of the world. Modern Florence was uncomfortably heaving with tourists, and it seemed unthinkable that Hannibal could ever have loved such a place. The architecture was beautiful, yes, and the history that saturated the place was no doubt fascinating, but the effect was somewhat lessened by the noisy bar on the corner and the hawkers selling plastic trinkets on the Piazza. Probably better for everyone that Hannibal was out of the picture; Will could too easily envisage the countless unfortunate tourists that would’ve met an unhappy end at Hannibal’s hands.

Not that there weren’t a few who were meeting unhappy ends at Will’s hands. But that was beside the point. 

Will wended his way through the crowded city streets until he came out onto a market square, no less filled with people but skewing slightly more towards locals than tourists. He had a few things to pick up, but otherwise little else to do that day but kill time. He didn’t like spending too much of his time in the house; it belonged to Hannibal, and was full of Hannibal’s things.

To the enclosed market hall first, for another random selection of food that he thought probably looked like a reasonable meal but which he wasn’t going to eat. Perhaps he’d get some artichokes today; the neat symmetry of the vegetable was pleasing to look at, and counting the leaves as he tore them off one by one would be eminently satisfying. Not to mention, the grocer who owned the best vegetable stall in the market could tell that there was something off about Will, and it amused him to spend too long silently perusing the vegetables just to make the man unsettled.

The grocer, as expected, greeted Will with his usual wary _signore_, and Will, as expected, smiled and kept smiling and didn’t look away as he gathered up every artichoke the man had in stock.

Then to the second-hand clothing vendor out on the forecourt, for more shirts. Will seemed to be buying shirts nearly every week, and if it wasn’t shirts then it was trousers. He should really find some wholesaler and just start buying in bulk, great boxes full of cheap t-shirts and sweatpants, but the thought of keeping such ugly things in Hannibal’s house was uncomfortable in a way that Will couldn’t quite pinpoint. The house was like a mausoleum, and Will had always had a healthy sense of reverence and respect for death. At least the clothes from the market seller were of a good quality and solid construction, if a little musty with age. 

The clothes seller didn’t find Will off-putting at all, and was always too happy to chatter mindlessly in his ear while Will idly inspected buttonholes and counted the stitches running along hemlines. It helped with the verisimilitude, if nothing else.

With his canvas shopping bag filled, Will ambled out of the square and onwards to a nearby public garden. It was as pleasant a place as any to spend the remainder of the day; the people-watching was good, and the noise of the city was muffled by the high surrounding walls and the spreading canopy of the trees. 

It had been nearly six months since his escape from Baltimore, and the freedom to sit and wile away the day on a park bench still felt somewhat foreign to Will. He had known so many freedoms over the course of his long life; the freedom to live, in spite of the onward march of time; freedom to fight and kill and sing the praises of death on wide dusty plains, or out on the open ocean; freedom from the drudgery of bodily functions and needs; the freedom to be beholden to but one thing and one thing only: the call of blood.

But right now, to sit on a park bench in the full flush of the Florentine summer was perhaps the sweetest freedom of them all. He could sit there for a thousand years as the whole city crumbled around him, and remain perfectly content all the while so long as the sun kept shining and the Earth kept spinning.

Will did not sit there for a thousand years, but he did sit there long enough for the sun to start sinking, shadows stretching across the park and roseate light fading into dusk. He’d need to go home soon; he’d been too long out of the house already, and there were unfortunate necessities to which he should attend.

On his way back through the twisting little streets, Will came upon an easy mark. There was no reason to pounce; he’d drained someone dry just last week, and wouldn’t need to feed again for the rest of the month. But where need was satisfied, desire was not, and Will began to pursue the solitary figure down a darkening alleyway.

He was a middle-aged man, skin turned tough and coppery by a lifetime spent outdoors. He would taste clean and simple, of oil and bread and the rolling green hills of the Tuscan countryside. Will picked up his pace, quick, steady steps until he was almost breathing down the man’s neck. He threaded a finger into the gold chain laying across the man’s nape, using it to jerk him back lightning-fast against his chest, then slamming him forward into the wall.

It was quick work after that. Will pulled the man’s shirt aside and bit down deep where shoulder met neck. He was dazed from being thrown against the wall, and didn’t struggle much. Will didn’t take a lot of blood, just enough to satisfy his impulse and keep him from stalking several more people on the rest of his walk home. It wouldn’t be smart to drop another body so soon. It wasn’t smart to be feeding at all, really. He’d already lingered in Florence too long. Someone would start to notice.

Will pulled a small folding knife from his shopping bag and made a few cuts over the bite mark, back and forth through the punctures until the area was a checkerboard mess of skin and blood. Then he flipped the man around so they were face to face, and slapped at his cheek until he roused enough for Will to catch his gaze.

“What’s your name?” Will asked. “Do you understand me?”

“Fr… Franco…” the man said, and then he started to slump, arms hanging heavy at his side and legs on the verge of buckling. Will must’ve taken more blood than he thought, or the man was already infirm to begin with. 

Will shoved Franco more forcefully up against the wall and held his lolling head in one firm hand. He had admittedly become lazy with clearing his tracks; too many random, unconnected victims across too many cities to bother wiping and replacing all their memories, and it didn’t matter if he left a few empty minds when they were all so scattered. But Will was sharply aware of the fact that he’d left too many blank holes in the heads of Florence already. It wouldn’t take much for someone to link them to the bodies and start seeing patterns. 

“You’re drunk, Franco. You stumbled into a railing and lacerated your shoulder. When you look at the wound later in the mirror, it won’t bother you enough to question it. Sit down now, have a rest before you go home. You’re drunk.”

Franco stared hazily into Will’s eyes, unblinking and nodding. Will carefully removed his hands from where they pinned Franco to the wall, and then Franco was no longer staring _at_ Will, but _through_ him, and he wandered off haphazardly a short way down the alley before stopping and sitting down on the cool cobblestones.

Will melted back into the shadows of the alley and was gone in an instant. 

The sun had fully set by the time Will got back to the house. It was an unassuming building from the outside, with its plain facade of smooth, pale stone and the high, solitary window that looked out over the street. The shutters were made of a dark cherry wood, and they were flung wide open.

Will stood outside the front door for a long time, just listening. He didn’t remember leaving the shutters open when he left that morning. He couldn’t hear any noises coming from inside the house, couldn’t see any light spilling from cracks in the doorframe. Cautiously, he opened the door and set his shopping bag down inside the hallway. 

He crept silently across the floor, fangs already out and ready to clamp down on whoever had made the mistake of intruding. As he ascended the stairs, he had the absurd thought that maybe he hadn’t wiped Franco as thoroughly as he should have, and now he was here with the proverbial torch and pitchfork. Getting paranoid over humans was as clear a sign as any to Will that he should move on from Florence soon.

But Will’s paranoia proved entirely unfounded: there was no intruder in the house. Rounding the top of the stairs and coming out onto the landing, he could see that it was only Hannibal, shuffling around the room like a corpse with his IV drip and his petty little resentments. He had churlishly opened the window and flung wide the shutters in some attempt to cause trouble.

The first thing Will did was slam the shutters and close the window. He’d taken great pains to conceal Hannibal as they moved across the continent, and he was not prepared to have their cover blown now just because Hannibal was feeling grumpy.

The second thing Will did was to ignore Hannibal for the rest of the evening. It was juvenile, and ultimately useless, but he knew that if he spoke he would say something incendiary, and then Hannibal would fire back with something cruel, and they would waste another evening sniping at each other. 

Will had brushed it off the first few times that Hannibal had acted out in such a manner, but with every new weight that strained the fragile bonds between them, Will thought again that maybe it would’ve been better if Hannibal had died in Baltimore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's going on?? why isn't hannibal a vampire? why is he being a shitty baby??? tune in next week to (maybe) find out........
> 
> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1189980899577909250), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/895681), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/188726855509/playing-dead-chapter-1)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter features the first of some new illustrations by [theseavoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSeaVoices/pseuds/TheSeaVoices)! it's always a pleasure and an honour to display her work alongside my fics

The Florentine house was, like Hannibal’s property in Baltimore, extravagant. But unlike Baltimore, this house was decorated far more warmly; where Baltimore had felt like a museum, chamber after echoing chamber filled with so many terrible and untouchable things, Florence was like a private club for the museum’s esteemed patrons. The hallways were lined with wood panelling in a thousand subtle shades and hues. The furniture in the sitting room was bespoke, hand-crafted by a family of local artisans who had been building furniture in the city for centuries. The blankets on the beds were all antique textiles, carefully and lovingly restored. The kitchen was Tuscan marble the colour of warm sand, grand and beautiful and covered in dust.

The bathroom was a different matter. It had been exquisite when they first arrived, with elegant frescoes on the walls, floor tiles coloured like the deep ocean, and a huge, shiny copper bathtub taking pride of place in the centre. Now the room was a cacophony of mirrors, hung on every empty patch of wall and propped up in every available corner. Some of them were modern and reflected Will’s image; most of them were far older, and showed only Hannibal’s scowling face.

The floor was dull and splattered with bloodstains. Will had placed towels on the floor to keep the worst of it off, but the attempt was half-hearted at best and if he knew where the mop was, he didn’t care enough to ever fetch it.

The tub was no longer shiny. Will had given up trying to keep it clean when his attempts to turn Hannibal kept on failing. Now the rim of the tub was turning black with the build-up of dried blood and other bodily fluids.

Hannibal was desperate to clean it. Will could see the twitch of his fingers, the grimace every time Hannibal lowered himself gingerly into the tub, but he was too weak to do much beyond lie on the sofa and complain about it. Vigorous cleaning was certainly outside the realm of Hannibal’s current capabilities.

Will had been sparing at first in his attempts to turn Hannibal, but Hannibal’s insistence that they try and try again, and Will’s apparent inability to say no, had got them to the point where Will was making the attempt nearly every week. The toll on Hannibal’s body was enormous, and the IV drip snaking out of his arm had become a near-permanent feature.

The last attempt had been mere days ago, but instead of packing up their things and preparing to leave for the next multimillion dollar bolthole like Will knew they should, they were in the bathroom and attempting the change again.

“I’m still angry that you opened the window,” Will said, trying to disconnect Hannibal from his IV drip. “I told you so many times not to do it. All it takes is one person to glance up from the street and see your face. We can’t risk it.”

“You have me locked up here like a prisoner. This is not at all what I imagined our future together would hold.” Hannibal batted Will’s hand away and disconnected the IV tube from his cannula himself. “I think I can be forgiven for wanting a little fresh air.”

“You get fresh air every damn night when I take you out into the courtyard. Don’t pretend that this was anything other than you trying to pick a fight.”

“Did it succeed, at least?”

Will closed his eyes and silently prayed for strength. “No. This isn’t a fight.”

“A shame. Maybe you should rip my ear off again.”

The ear was Hannibal’s favourite fallback. No matter that Will had done it just to provide some evidence that Hannibal was dead, no matter that Will had immediately applied his healing blood to the wound to help a new ear grow in its place, no matter that Will had done it all solely to smooth the way for their escape; as far as Hannibal was concerned, it was just another scab to pick at. But all Will said was, “Get in the bath.”

Hannibal eased himself in slowly, crusts of dry blood flaking away from the sides of the tub as he settled and adjusted himself. He hadn’t removed any of his clothes, and it just made him look all the more frail, veins standing out in stark relief against the soft drape of his shirtsleeves. 

“Remind me again why we’re doing it this way,” Hannibal said, in a tone of voice that suggested the last thing he wanted was to be reminded of why they were doing it _this way_.

“Because,” Will grunted, fiddling around with sticky tape and plastic tubing, “we’ve tried the old-fashioned way and it didn’t take.”

“This approach hasn’t exactly been taking either, Will. The old-fashioned way was far more stimulating.”

“And it also has an incredibly high rate of failure. This way is easier to control, more precise. Do you want the change or not?”

“You know that I do.”

“Then stop nitpicking.” Will connected the new tube to Hannibal’s cannula. The needle had been inserted in the same spot where he’d bitten Hannibal that first time, back in Baltimore. He could see the marks, the shiny, pink little punctures where his teeth had sunk in so easily. Already half-healed by the time Will had hauled Hannibal over the butcher block and poured his regenerative blood down Hannibal’s throat, they were scars that would never fully fade. 

Will felt an absurd stab of sentimentality, and swiftly brushed it aside. “Okay. Where do you want to bleed from today?”

“Surprise me.”

Will took a knife from his box of supplies, a mean little thing with a smooth wooden handle and a wickedly sharp blade, and stuck it deep into Hannibal’s thigh. 

Hannibal didn’t flinch, just closed his eyes briefly and worked his jaw. “The femoral artery, again. That’s not very surprising, Will.”

“I swear to God, Hannibal, I will walk out of this house right now and never come back.”

“Then walk,” Hannibal challenged, and Will slammed his fist into the side of the tub in frustration. For a long moment they just stared at each other, both on the brink of doing something stupid.

Eventually, Will silently picked up and inserted his own cannula, connecting himself to Hannibal via two metres of sterile plastic tubing. He watched his blood wind its way through the tube until it got to Hannibal’s end. Then he yanked the knife out of Hannibal’s thigh.

The rush of blood was sudden and powerful, and Hannibal’s trousers and Will’s hand quickly became soaked. Will perched on the edge of the tub and slowly licked the blood from his fingers while Hannibal’s body spasmed and eventually stilled. Every time they did this, Hannibal passed out from the blood loss a little quicker. If Will couldn’t get the change to happen soon, he’d have to consider holding off entirely for months, maybe even a year, to let Hannibal come back to his full health. It would not be a pleasant time for either of them. 

But Will knew that Hannibal would demand they try again as soon as he awoke from this current attempt, just as he would demand after the next failed attempt, and the next, and the next.

The longer they remained like this, with Hannibal suspended in a bloody half-life, coming back from the brink over and over, the more reluctant Will became to see the thing done. Over the preceding months Hannibal had grown difficult to deal with, borderline petulant. Will didn’t want to be stuck in the mire of yet another petty argument, only for that to be the time that the change finally took hold, and then Hannibal would be frozen forever with a sneer on his lips and a chip in his heart.

Will wanted… He didn’t know what he wanted. The old Hannibal, maybe, whoever that was. The Hannibal he had known in Baltimore, after the revelation but before the blood and the escape to Europe, when they would just sit and talk and exist together. Before Will had recklessly dangled the promise of eternal life, and Hannibal had grasped at it viciously and refused to let go.

Perhaps the new Hannibal, if Will could just make the damn change stick, if he could bear to open himself up like he knew he should, instead of meeting every one of Hannibal’s jabs with another brick in the wall between them. 

After every attempt, when Hannibal had been drained and filled with Will’s blood and left to stew overnight, there would be a brief moment, just a small handful of seconds, where Hannibal awoke and he was thrumming with power, radiant and vital as a king. Those moments were what kept Will trying again and again, the tiny glimpses of Hannibal elevated to a level beyond what he had ever achieved in his human life.

But it always ended up a false hope, Hannibal’s awakenings being nothing more than the defibrillator effect of Will’s blood as it shocked him back into life and then faded into nothing. The small chance that it wouldn’t fade, that Hannibal would awake strong and full of new vampiric life and then _stay_ that way, seemed to become more impossible to grasp the harder they reached for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh dear :(
> 
> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1192519005476704256), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/903496), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/188884617979/playing-dead-chapter-2)
> 
> you can find theseavoices and her beautiful work on [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSeaVoices/pseuds/TheSeaVoices), [twitter](https://twitter.com/TheSeaVoices), and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/TheSeaVoices) for uncensored art; as well as [tumblr](https://theseavoices.tumblr.com/), [instagram](https://www.instagram.com/theseavoices/), and [facebook](https://facebook.com/theseavoices)!


	3. Chapter 3

Miriam was a ghost. Physically, she still moved through the world and her presence was tangible and real, but in all other aspects she was reduced down to a shadow. Her and Bev's little house had grown cold over the months; every room held the echo of a stranger, every meal held the memory of the dead.

It was easy to let it happen, to start walking through walls with her head in her laptop, dark circles around dark eyes set in a dark, hollow face. It felt as though she’d been a ghost all this time, and the past few years she had just been playing at being human, living a life that had never been real.

As far as the FBI was concerned, Hannibal Lecter was dead and Will Graham never existed. They fabricated some story, a burglary that went wrong and ended in a murder so grisly that just an ear remained, and only upon assessing the crime scene did they discover that the victim was the Chesapeake Ripper himself.

Jack took an undisclosed figure in severance pay, packed up his desk, and left without a backward glance for the Florida Keys. He had not reached out to anyone and had rebuffed all attempts at contact with an impenetrable wall of silence. Whether he was rewarding himself for a job well done, or exiling himself as punishment, no-one knew.

Miriam was given a similar pay-off, ostensibly some very delayed compensation for injury in the field, since it was her work for the Bureau that led to her kidnapping and maiming so many years ago. Along with the money, she was carefully advised that her job as Will’s handler had never existed; she did some teaching at the Academy, and she did some consultancy work for Jack, and they had paperwork stretching back years to prove it. Her old office in the basement was and always had been part of a larger storage area, and she owned a small house out in Wolf Trap which she had been renting out for years to a succession of happy tenants. She was now taking a year off to fix up the house and do some travelling. She was undecided if she would return to work afterwards.

Bev did not get any compensation. The story she was told to stick to was that she had taken an extended period of medical leave, for private reasons that she did not want to discuss with fellow colleagues. She had never gone snooping in Hannibal Lecter’s house, and had never been held in the Witness Protection Unit. She was re-adjusting well after a long period of illness and was just as horrified as everyone else when the news broke that their occasional outside consultant, Hannibal Lecter, had been a serial killer all along.

The fairy tales made things bearable, to a point. It was easy to look at it all laid out on paper and say _yes, that’s it, that’s what really happened. _It was not so easy to lie in bed at night, with the glow of laptop screens and the frantic tapping of keys reminding Bev and Miriam that no, that was not what happened at all.

It had started innocently enough. After the utter collapse of Jack and Miriam’s plot, when it was strongly suggested to Miriam that she take a sabbatical, she’d looked at the endless string of days and months before her and decided to find something to fill the time. It was natural to want to know what happened, if that annoying little voice in the back of her head was really telling the truth when it said Hannibal was still alive and kicking. She wouldn’t do anything with the information, if she even found anything out at all. It would just be closure, a decisive full stop at the end of an unpleasant story. Just a hobby, an idle way to kill time until she could get herself sorted out and maybe find a new job somewhere else. 

But Miriam was never one to do things in an idle manner. A cursory websearch on her phone one afternoon turned into a slightly deeper search on her computer the next evening; turned into a running list of recent murders that struck her as suspicious, and heavy-handed overtures to an old friend who worked for Interpol; turned into a map full of pins and strings and the frantic, hasty typing up of every piece of info Will had ever let slip during their conversations together, before they faded from her memory forever. Had he ever mentioned anything about the process of turning a human? Was it drawn out, or did it happen instantly? How easy would it be to transport a seemingly dead body out of the country without the necessary paperwork? Was there a vampire network that he could call on to facilitate these things? 

These questions and more like them swirled around inside Miriam’s skull day after day, night after night. She could feel herself withdrawing, pulling the tendrils of her life back inside herself and using them to build a wall. There was a small part of her that felt resentment towards Bev, that she could seemingly get on with life so easily; she would watch her, climbing out of bed early in the morning to get ready for work, while Miriam was hunched over her laptop just as she had been all night. Bev made it look so damn easy.

Logically, Miriam knew that Bev was likely just putting on a brave face, taking a deep breath and powering on through as Miriam herself had done for so many years. But it didn’t stop the stab of anger, the selfish feeling that Miriam had done her time and endured the sick feeling in her head, and now she should get to relax while someone else took on the burden. It wasn’t fair: she had worked so hard to try and cut the trauma out of her life, but after all of her effort it was still there and it hurt worse than ever.

Bev watched it happen, the slow descent into consuming obsession, and she felt utterly powerless to do a thing to stop it. She was barely holding herself together, and though she wanted so much to hold Miriam together as well, she couldn’t. It took all of her strength just to get up and go to work and pretend that she was okay.

It was compounded by the fact that Bev privately held the opinion that she didn’t even have any right to be feeling as she did. Miriam was allowed to be a mess; she’d been mutilated and held captive by one of the most notorious and prolific serial killers in modern history, and after concealing her troubles for so many years it was understandable that she couldn’t hold it in any longer. But all that happened to Bev was that she saw something nasty in a basement. She should’ve got over it months ago. She _would_ get over it. She just had to not think about it, not feel anything about it, not afford it any more acknowledgement than was absolutely necessary.

But the further that Miriam sank into her fixation with tracking Hannibal and Will, the harder it was for Bev to pretend like everything was fine. It was right there in her face every day, flashing across screens and pinned up on the walls, and it was leeching the life from the both of them. She didn’t blame Miriam for it; it was easy enough to see the trains of thought that had led her to this point. She didn’t even blame Jack, not really; if he hadn’t plotted with Miriam in the first place, she would’ve just plotted on her own.

The people she blamed were Hannibal and Will. Blaming Hannibal was obvious, and almost an afterthought; afterall, he had visited upon them both the most obvious and immediate horrors in their lives. But blaming Will felt satisfying and righteous and good, like she’d finally identified the root cause of something insidious, and now all she had to do was rip it out like a weed. 

At least Hannibal was human, malleable like a human and mortal like a human and only able to do that which any other human could do. Will was-- Bev couldn’t even begin to understand what Will was. She’d worked alongside him, had made gentle offers of friendship towards him, and was all the while blind to the supernatural horror of him.

By the time Miriam shook Bev awake one night, frantic and excited and talking too quickly, Bev barely even recognised her, a stranger speaking with her girlfriend’s voice. The reflexive thought was familiar by now, _Just one more thing that Hannibal and Will have taken from me, _but then she actually listened to what Miriam was saying.

“I found a pattern, Bev, a new pattern. Look.” Miriam thrust the laptop into Bev’s face, screen glowing as bright as the sun in their dark bedroom. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a list of purchases and deliveries in various cities across Europe.

“Is that a shopping list? What am I looking at?” 

“They’re from a few different medical supply stores and with a few different cards, but it’s the same order every time. Look. And then these,” Miriam scrolled the page down to a second list, “DIY stores. Same orders. Same times as the med supplies. Who needs to buy IV bags and tarps that often?”

Bev pressed her fingers into her eyes as she tried to will away the fog of sleep. “That’s weak, Miri. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“Right, right, I know. But you know that string of cases I found, where the people were slashed up just on one little area on their body? The physical evidence that someone had done _something_, but the victims had no memory of the attack itself. Black holes in their minds, perfect recall before and after and then just a sudden blank space. And there were the murders as well, remember? Same style, slashed up on one specific area, like the perp was trying to hide bite marks, right? Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember. That was stronger than these shopping lists--”

“These are the locations of the attacks,” Miriam interrupted, bringing up a map of mainland Europe, dotted with blue markers that were scattered across the continent. There was a small cluster in Italy, centered around Florence, but apart from that they looked utterly random. “And then these are the delivery locations of the purchases.” Miriam brought up a second map, showing all the previous blue markers as well as a host of new red ones. The overlap between the two was considerable. “They’re in Florence right now. I know it.”

When it was displayed like that, Bev had to concede that maybe there was something to it. The attacks and the purchases lined up with an almost startling regularity, dates and cities aligning so neatly that it may as well have been a flashing neon sign. It felt like a trap, and it looked like a trap, but Miriam had a light in her eyes that Bev hadn’t seen in months, and she couldn’t bear to see it extinguished. 

Bev stared at the map for a long time. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, finally. “Be honest with me.”

“Because,” Miriam said, “I’m not ready to give up. I want… He-- he _owes_ me.” 

“Which one? Who owes you?”

“Both of them! I thought I could be cold and remote, you know, just like Hannibal, detached from all my feelings. He made me believe it was possible. I was so good for so long, I was a model prisoner and then a model survivor and he never even told me what he did it all for.” Miriam’s mouth twitched, and she bit at the inside of her cheek to stop the unhappy downturn of her lips. “It’s not fair. I could see that he was getting inside Will’s head as well and I tried to help him get away, just make it all finally _stop_, but he just stabbed me in the back. Hannibal owes me his life in exchange for the life that he took from me. And Will owes me the chance to forget that my life was ever taken.” Miriam took Bev’s hands and looked at her imploringly. Bev’s heart broke a little. “This can be it. Our clean break.”

“You can’t just wish your problems away, Miriam. The world doesn’t work like that.”

“I can. It does,” Miriam said, and Bev’s heart broke a little more.

The next day, Bev called in sick to work, and Miriam booked flights to Italy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> is ANYONE ever gonna have a nice time in this fic??? guess we'll just have to wait and see.............
> 
> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1195043389542191110), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/910370), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/189063739834/playing-dead-chapter-3)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter features the second illustration by [theseavoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSeaVoices/pseuds/TheSeaVoices)!

Florence seemed to Bev to be a perpetual headache. The airport had been busy, and the roads from the airport to the city had been busy, and now standing in the middle of the Piazza del Duomo, all she could see and hear was _busy_. It set her teeth on edge and made her heart hammer in her chest.

It was absurd. She had never in her life shied away from crowds. She was a confident, no-nonsense woman, who took no shit and paid no mind; but in the middle of this ancient, sprawling city, she felt as though a rope had been wrapped around her neck and she was slowly choking to death with not a thing she could do to stop it.

She and Miriam had a room in a small and worn down little hotel, tucked away at the end of an alley where the sunlight was all but blocked entirely by the buildings looming up on either side. In any other circumstances it might’ve been pleasant, even a little romantic. But there had been no time to stop and open the shutters and look out at the few pale flowers clinging to the railings of the tiny balcony; at Miriam’s insistence, they had arrived, dumped their luggage, and then immediately left again to start prowling the streets.

They spent their entire first morning in the city fruitlessly roaming the maze-like web of streets, with nothing to show for it but sore feet and worsening jet lag. Florence was a large city full of hundreds of thousands of people, and Miriam and Bev were trying to find precisely two of those people through little more than luck and a hunch.

“Can we go back to the hotel?” Bev asked. “I’m tired. This place is giving me a headache.”

“No,” Miriam said distractedly, eyes glued to her phone. “It’s barely lunchtime. You slept on the plane. Drink some water if you have a headache, it’s hot and you’re probably just dehydrated.”

Bev had been chugging water all morning. She sighed. “What are you going to do if you find them?”

“_When_ I find them. When _we_ find them. I’m going to…” Miriam’s sentence trailed off as she became engrossed in something on the screen. “We should take a look over by the Sant’Ambrogio Market. Come on. It’s not far.”

Miriam walked off abruptly, and Bev had no choice but to follow. “What are we looking for?” she called, jogging to catch up with Miriam’s brisk pace.

“I’m not sure. But I know a guy in the polizia, we were at college together, he did a year in the States. I called in a favour, asked for a heads up on anything weird.” Miriam pulled out her phone again and scrolled through her texts, eyes flicking between the screen and the crowds ahead. “He messaged me just now, told me someone found a necklace around the market, handed it in to the station.”

“So?”

“There was blood on it.”

“Oh my god, Miriam. That could’ve been from _anything_.” Bev stopped and tugged at what remained of Miriam’s left arm, jerking her back and trying to force some eye contact. Miriam had barely looked at her since they touched down in Italy. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you believe this is a good idea.”

Miriam stared at Bev’s feet, and then at her right shoulder, and then finally she met Bev’s eyes. For a long, painful moment, Miriam said nothing, just stood there with her wide haunted eyes and her mouth that hadn’t quite stopped twitching for months. “We need to go to the market,” was all she said, and pulled away roughly from Bev’s grip.

The Sant’Ambrogio Market was set in a wide square, with a main market hall surrounded by a haphazard spread of outside stalls. The hall itself was crammed full of food vendors, tables piled high with fruits and vegetables, great freezer units packed with ice and seafood, and hooks of meat strung up like festive garlands. There were food bar set-ups as well, for hungry shoppers to stop and sit for a bite of lampredotto or ribollita. 

On any other occasion, Bev would’ve been happy to spend an entire day in the market hall, taking in the sharp cold scent of oysters on ice, or letting her eyes wander over the rainbow displays of fresh produce. Maybe she and Miriam would’ve found themselves by the wine vendor, let themselves be talked into purchasing a bottle that they couldn’t afford, then wandered outside to sit at a table and share a drink under the sun while the rest of the world just walked on by.

But it was not any other occasion, and though the market hall was blessedly air-conditioned and the vendors called out their wares in pleasant sing-song voices, Bev still felt hot and prickly and jumpy. At least in the square outside there had been a little more room to breathe.

They made three circuits of the market hall before Bev was able to convince Miriam to let them stop and get something to eat. The queues and the press of people within the hall were uncomfortably oppressive, so they went back out into the square and headed for a battered-looking food truck parked under an awning.

“Why were we even looking in there?” Bev asked, around a mouthful of salami and salty bread. “Didn’t your guy say the necklace was found in one of the side streets?”

“We’re covering all bases,” Miriam said, restlessly scanning the faces passing through the square. “Until I know what we’re looking for, we just need to look everywhere. Start in the centre and fan out from there.”

“What are you hoping for? A pool of blood and a detailed confession note? This is ridiculous.”

“I’m _hoping_ for--” Miriam stopped suddenly, peering intently at something or someone across the square. “Hey!” she yelled, piercingly loud. “_Hey!_”

Under the metallic arch of the market hall entryway, Will Graham stopped and stared back. 

***

They sat at a rickety table outside a small café, and Will ordered coffees and sweet pastries from the surly-looking waiter. They were all silent while they waited for their food and drinks to arrive, customers chatting around them and pedestrians breezing past them without a care in the world.

The coffee smelled heavenly when it arrived, and Bev immediately drew a cup towards herself and breathed in the steam. The pastries looked sickly, covered in icing sugar and jellied fruits and thick cream, and though she could gladly eat another five helpings of the sandwich she’d gulped down earlier, she left the food alone.

“It’s good to see you, Miriam. Beverly.”

“Is it?” Bev shot back. Will looked at her serenely, and she drained half her coffee in one go.

“You need to tell us what happened,” Miriam said, ignoring Bev’s hostility. “Where Hannibal is. Why-- Why you didn’t do what I asked of you.”

“I did part of what you asked. His body is in Baltimore. I’m here alone. I killed him.”

“No you didn’t,” Miriam replied immediately. “You’ve been buying IV drips. I hardly think you’ve been doing that because you want to carry on the old tubes-and-bags feeding process.”

“I’m keeping a stock of fresh food in the house,” Will said, matter-of-fact, and it made Bev want to vomit. “I need to keep them going for a while. Don’t want them to dry up too soon, you know?”

Miriam ploughed on, seemingly unaffected. “Keeping people captive in your house is too much of a risk. You don’t shit where you eat. Better to drink them and drop them wherever you find them. Hannibal is the only person you’d risk keeping at home.”

Will peered at her for a long moment. He’d always enjoyed Miriam’s shrewdness. “Okay. I didn’t kill him. But he is neutralised, for the time being.”

“Neutralised isn’t good enough. You have to kill him, Will. You seem so… different, already. He’s poisoning you. Don’t let him get any further inside you than he already has.”

“Who says he’s been inside me at all?” Will said with a leer.

“For God’s sake, Will--”

“Okay. Not the time for jokes. Fair enough. I suppose if I kill him, you still want me to wipe you two afterwards as well?” Will asked, and Miriam nodded. Bev just stared at her hands, clenched whiteknuckle in her lap. “Why, though? I could just wipe you both right now and you wouldn’t care at all if Hannibal was still alive. You’d have no idea who he was.”

“Maybe we should--” Bev began to say, but Miriam cut in.

“I don’t care that I won’t remember. He has to die. He took my life from me. I want his life taken from him.”

“And we’ll all end up blind. Very biblical.” Will took one of the untouched, sugar-dusted pastries from the table and shoved the whole thing into his mouth. “Alright then. You want him dead? Consider it done.”

“As easy as that?”

“As easy as that. I’m bored here. It’s time to move on, and he’s proving to be more trouble than I anticipated.” Will licked the sugar off his lips and smiled. “Dead weight.”

“Were you always so cold?” Miriam asked, a little taken aback. The man who sat before her now was so far from the man who had passed time with idle chit-chat in her little basement office, and she had no sure way of telling which one was real.

“I learned from the best.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just picture will stuffing 5 pastries in his mouth and spraying icing sugar all over everyone when he tries to speak. "HGHGHGGGHGHBLBRLLLLPPGPFFFFTT"
> 
> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1197581907317415936), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/917465), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/189212972279/playing-dead-chapter-4)
> 
> you can find theseavoices and her beautiful work on [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSeaVoices/pseuds/TheSeaVoices), [twitter](https://twitter.com/TheSeaVoices), and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/TheSeaVoices) for uncensored art; as well as [tumblr](https://theseavoices.tumblr.com/), [instagram](https://www.instagram.com/theseavoices/), and [facebook](https://facebook.com/theseavoices)!


	5. Chapter 5

Will left Beverly and Miriam at the café, with instructions to meet him the following day at a nearby park. On the walk back to the house, he turned over in his mind the options he now had laid out before him. He could do just as he said he would, kill Hannibal and wipe him from memory and then take off somewhere new. It was an appealing thought, to be cut loose and on the road again; so much of his life he had spent solitary and transitory, and he liked it that way.

He could take Hannibal and disappear into the night, lead Beverly and Miriam on a wild chase across the continent. Maybe even take a foray into Asia, though it would be far more difficult for him to blend in. But what was life without a little danger? It had been too long since he’d had a real thrill. Moving Hannibal in his current state would be difficult, though. Would his body even hold together through the upheaval of a cross-continental race into oblivion?

Or he could attempt the change again tonight, one last time. There was a good chance that it would fail again, just as it had failed so many countless times already. It was the jagged friction between them, the months of bickering and sullen silences that made up the roadblock on their path to the future; Will’s blood could flow freely into Hannibal’s body, but the spark, the vital essence that would transform Hannibal from human to vampire, was not getting through. 

Will could snap his fingers and make it all go away if he wanted to; it was a perk of his vampire nature that he could choose what bothered him and what didn’t, fine-tune his feelings to be perfectly in line with whatever a given situation required, and to do so wouldn’t bother Will in the slightest. It was an act as simple as choosing whether to sit or to stand, and the resultant feelings would be no less authentic for it. Every emotion would be deep and true, from the word go right up until the moment he decided to stop.

But Will was stubborn, sometimes to a fault. He didn’t want to give it up so easy. They would go into it as equals or not at all, and Hannibal had to understand that Will was not a toy to be played with or thrown out of the pram as the whim took him. 

Will arrived back at the house with no real decision made, and as he crossed the threshold from the hallway to the sitting room he could see Hannibal, entrenched on the sofa in his ostentatious silk robe and gearing up to greet Will with what was no doubt some terribly clever and cutting remark. 

Will held up a weary hand, and to his faint disbelief Hannibal actually paused. “No. Not tonight, Hannibal. No more of your barbs. I’m sick to death of it all. We have more important things to think about right now. We’ve been found.”

“I see. Beverly and Miriam, I assume?”

“Yes. They cornered me at the market.”

“And I suppose now you’re going whisk me off into the night again, leaving them another flimsy murder scene to discover? Your last one evidently didn’t work out so well, if they’ve managed to find us.”

Will groaned and rubbed his hands over his face. “This is why I don’t want to fucking turn you, Hannibal. Everything is a problem for you these days. You’re in the middle of the longest, shittiest tantrum I’ve ever seen. A vampire’s temperament is formed largely by the mood they were in when they were turned, and I do not want to turn you when you’re like this and then be saddled with your eternal bad mood.”

For a few seconds, Hannibal was perfectly still, his face blank while he tried and failed to select the appropriate emotion. When he did speak, it was careful to the point of hesitation. “I didn’t realise you were having second thoughts about this.”

“I’m not having second thoughts,” Will sighed. “I just… You make it hard. As much as I’ve been able, I’ve always lived my life alone, and I’ve taken great pains to keep it that way. Right now you’re really making me regret ever trying to integrate into society. It’s difficult, okay? Turning a human is difficult. If it wasn’t, there would be a hell of a lot more vampires running around. It’s not just your body that needs to accept the change, Hannibal. You need to be open to accepting it and _I_ need to be open to giving it. If we’re out of sync then it’s not going to take, no matter how many times we try. It’s mental as much as it is physical, and lately I’ve been struggling to remember why I liked you so much.” Will sat down heavily next to Hannibal and put his head in his hands, and then laughed bitterly. “We should’ve tried when you sucked my dick. It would’ve worked then, I guarantee.”

“This is the first time you’ve acknowledged that encounter.”

“And that’s the first time you’ve acknowledged it.”

“I would’ve done more, if you’d asked it of me. I expected… hoped… that you would,” Hannibal said slowly, a not insubstantial amount of old hurt underlining his words. “But it seemed to mean little to you in the grand scheme of things.”

“It was a mistake. I hadn’t planned it. It shouldn’t have happened.”

“Then why did it?”

“I don’t know. I wanted it.”

“Have you wanted it since?”

Will looked sidelong at Hannibal, a beat of silence before he responded. “Not enough to do anything about it.”

“But you have wanted it.”

“Please stop poking at me and just say whatever it is you have to say.”

“You’re falling into old patterns, pointlessly rebuilding walls between us that had already been torn down. It hurts us both, and makes us hurt each other in turn.”

“Maybe I like to hurt.”

“Then there are more mutually satisfying ways to hurt than this. Will, you said that for the change to take hold, you have to be open to giving it. You’re sealing yourself back inside your forts. Come down from your high tower and understand that opening yourself fully to me is not the weakness that it would be with any other human. I am not one of them. I came into this life only so that you could take me beyond it. Perhaps waiting for the change has made me sour in these past months, but I’ll not apologise for it. All this time I have been waiting for you, Will. I would not have waited for any other.”

And there it was, the tiny admission that was Hannibal’s equivalent of rolling over and exposing his underbelly. It was the Hannibal that Will hadn’t seen in months, the Hannibal who sat across from him in therapy, at dinner, late at night in front of the fireplace; the golden spiderweb cracks in the porcelain exterior, tiny glimpses of the tender flesh beneath. Will was Hannibal’s one weakness, and Hannibal had always wielded it as a weapon. His soft parts were quicksand, ready to swallow Will up at the first tentative touch. 

“You make me weak,” Will said, though there was no anger or resentment in his words.

“We make each other weak,” Hannibal countered, “and drive each other to reckless and cruel actions. But together we are still stronger than any who could hope to stand against us.”

“You would paint the world red, wouldn’t you? Leave cities awash in blood.”

“Only for you,” Hannibal said. And then, for the second time that evening, he was on the verge of hesitation when he asked: “Do you experience love?”

Will smiled. Hannibal might as well have torn his own heart out and laid it in Will’s lap. “I did when I was human. Or at least, I experienced something that felt like it. But the things I feel as a vampire don’t really map neatly to the human range of emotion. Love is part of a feeling that I can experience, but it’s not a whole feeling by itself.” Will shifted in his seat to look at Hannibal fully, at the proud, aristocratic line of his nose and the pillow of his lips. He looked more like a vampire than Will ever had. “Why do you ask?”

“A little apprehension, I suppose.”

“Worried that you’ll fall madly in love with me after the change?” Will asked, half-joking. 

“To the point of foolishness, yes. It is a concern. You’re already… important to me, Will. More than I can adequately convey. I wouldn’t have let you anger me so if I didn’t care about you. But I’ve no wish to be a slave.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve never experienced emotion as others do. I never wanted to. But when I knew you in Baltimore you were nothing but emotion, a restless sea of churning feelings that you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, control. You had a panic attack in the foyer of my house. I don’t want to become a vampire only to discover that every emotion is a consuming tidal wave. I find the idea of being overwhelmed like that to be repulsive. If that’s what life is like for you, I would rather remain human.”

“I wasn’t sure if you remembered the panic attack thing,” Will said. “Those were extreme circumstances. I’d been playing at being human for decades, and I’d let human weakness creep in. When… when I don’t fight what I am, all emotions are optional. I can view and dissect them from the outside, choose what to feel and exactly how much I want to feel it. Nothing is overwhelming. Everything is possible.” Will placed a cool hand against Hannibal’s chest, and felt the weak thud of his heart. In that moment, he was decided: Hannibal would die for the final time tonight. Will would bite over his heart, sink his teeth into the fluttering muscle and drink deep. And if their stars aligned and their blood was true, he would arise the next day burning brighter than the sun. “You don’t need to be concerned, Hannibal. You’ve never really been human. You can choose to love me or not.”

“Just as you have chosen?”

Will tilted his head and parted his lips, and let his fangs slide out on a purposeful exhale. “Yes,” he said, all teeth and covetous eyes.

“I fear my choice is already made,” Hannibal said, and he sounded just like he had miles away and months ago, patching up a savage bite mark on his arm, staring at Will’s reflection in his bathroom mirror and promising never to stop him.

“I know you’re just telling me what I want to hear,” Will murmured, mouth suddenly very close to Hannibal’s ear, “but it’s working. Maybe there’s truth behind it. Maybe there isn’t. I don’t care either way. You’re sly, and tricky. I like that about you. Base anger and pettiness was never very becoming of you.”

“What else do you like about me, Will?”

“I like your teeth. Fangs would look beautiful in your mouth. I like the way you walk. Your penchant for manipulation. The way you manoeuvred me back in Baltimore, serving me that fucking human steak, _god_… I don’t think it was even a truly conscious decision on your part. You just couldn’t help it. You slide people into these situations even when you have no reason to. You’re a snake.”

“Would that make you Eve?”

Will ran his lips over the fine skin of Hannibal’s neck, tracing the pattern of veins and the dip of muscle. “It was hardly Eden I was in, but you were my passage out into something new. Fuck, you smell so good. Take this off.” Will pulled at Hannibal’s sleeve, dragging it down to expose his shoulder and chest. His other hand still lay against Hannibal’s chest, and he began to move his fingers against Hannibal’s impossibly warm skin, desirous and possessive.

“Kiss me,” Hannibal said, and Will was on his mouth almost before the words had left his lips. “Bite me,” Hannibal said, and Will pulled Hannibal’s head back and sank his teeth into Hannibal’s shoulder. “Fuck me,” Hannibal said, and Will moaned into Hannibal’s skin.

Will gathered up Hannibal’s trailing robe and slung his arm under his knees. “Put your arms around my neck.”

Hannibal did as requested, and Will picked him up as though he weighed nothing at all. “I’m not fucking you on that damn couch. I’ve half a mind to burn the thing. I don’t ever want to see you sitting on it again,” Will said between kisses, the heat of Hannibal’s mouth too intoxicating to resist.

They made it to the bedroom, and Will threw Hannibal down on the bed with no great care for how he landed. He stripped quickly and inelegantly, and was back sprawling over Hannibal within seconds. He licked at the bite wound on Hannibal’s shoulder, a few sluggish drops of blood still leaking out, and then they were kissing again, Hannibal breathless and overheated.

Will was hard, harder than he’d been when Hannibal had sunk to his knees in Baltimore; harder than he’d been two hundred years ago in the middle of an orgy that still made him colour a little to think of it; harder than he’d been as a green boy in his first ever tumble in a haystack, feeling as though his whole body might explode.

Hannibal was half-hard at best. He doubted greatly his ability to maintain an erection, weak as he was after so many months of being drained of all his blood, and though Will kissed him thoroughly and rubbed his hard body luxuriously against him, Hannibal’s doubts proved correct.

“It doesn’t matter,” Will said, already working his way down Hannibal’s body. “It means now I can do this.” He took Hannibal’s soft cock into his mouth, dragging it delicately between his fangs; if Hannibal had been fully hard, his cock would’ve been too thick to safely fit and Will’s teeth would’ve torn it to shreds. Will laved his tongue over the pliable flesh, wrapping the lushness of his lips around the faintly swollen head and then pulling back to open his mouth wantonly and let the dangerous points of his teeth peek out. 

“I would let you,” Hannibal breathed, staring at Will’s teeth where they hovered over his tender flesh. “I would let you do anything.”

Will smiled savagely, and licked a long stripe up the length of Hannibal’s cock. “Ask me when you’re changed.”

Will sat up then, and pushed up Hannibal’s legs from where they were splayed about his hips. He gave his own cock a few long strokes, then rubbed the head against Hannibal’s body, smearing pre-come between his cheeks. “Do you like it to hurt?” Will asked, already breaching gently with a finger.

“Spit on me once. That will suffice.”

“In all my years I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so filthy,” Will said, and then pushed Hannibal’s legs back further.

“I’m, ah, I’m sure you ha--” Hannibal’s words were cut short as Will let a long trail of saliva fall from his lips and land hot on Hannibal’s hole. 

“Oh, I have heard plenty worse,” Will mused, pressing the head of his cock into Hannibal’s body and pushing in excruciatingly slow, “but, fuck, it’s _your_ mouth that makes it sound so, so…” 

Will fell forward onto his elbows and rolled his hips, and for the next few minutes words were put aside in favour of the fevered clutch of their hands, the crush of their lips, the push and pull of their bodies in tandem.

Will bent his head and bit gently into the flesh of Hannibal’s chest, directly over his heart. “What does that feel like?” he asked, his voice little more than a husky murmur.

“Like I want to die.”

“Good. Hold onto that.” Will sank his teeth further into the heaving muscle, sucking and licking at the blood that overflowed from the wound. Hannibal twined his fingers into Will’s hair, sighing and moaning at every swipe of his tongue and thrust of his hips. Truly, Hannibal couldn’t think of anything so transcendent, so purely blissful as this. He had thought that being hauled over his butcher block and drained like a sacrifice at the altar of Will’s godhood was the peak of ecstasy, but the memory of that first draining now faded into nothing. This was his true arrival, the moment he had sought his whole life before ever he knew that such a thing existed. 

Will pulled his mouth away briefly, and bit his own wrist to let a spill of bright blood come forth. He held it against Hannibal’s mouth, urging him to drink, and then bit down anew into the meat of Hannibal’s chest. The pull was harder this time, Will drawing out great mouthfuls of blood every second, and Hannibal knew that he must drink deeply of Will in turn. He released a hand from Will’s hair and used it to hold Will’s wrist more firmly in place, difficult though it was to coordinate his limbs. He felt light as air and just as insubstantial, as though Will’s blood would fall into his mouth and through the back of his skull.

Even as his life began slipping away, Hannibal could feel the heat rising within him, though he could no longer tell if it was the warmth of Will’s blood dripping messy over his face or if it was the rushing tidal wave of his orgasm. Will was biting him, and he was fucking him, and he was killing him, and he was filling him with new life so that he need never die again. 

Keeping Will’s bleeding wrist clamped to his mouth was a struggle. Hannibal barely had strength left to hold himself together any more, so he let his arms drop to the bed and let the blood smear over his face and trusted that Will would do what needed to be done.

The last bright image that seared itself into Hannibal’s mind was of Will above him, mouth dark and bloody and hanging open in pleasure as he spilled himself inside. The terrible searing light of him expanded and blinded and burned Hannibal up where he lay, a great flare in the darkness of existence as his human life crumbled to ash and drifted away on the winds of oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoo boy i sure hope it worked that time!!
> 
> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1200098136750018562), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/933252), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/189353109789/playing-dead-chapter-5)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> featuring the final illustration by the wonderful [theseavoices](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSeaVoices/pseuds/TheSeaVoices). enjoy :)

They met in a small park, beneath the bough of a pink-flowering tree. The blossoms sprouted directly from the trunk, and were crushed under Will’s shoulder where he stood leaning against the bark.

Bev was visibly uncomfortable, never turning her back to Will and keeping one watchful eye on the quickest routes out of the park. Miriam was antsy, buzzing with nervous energy and an almost sick excitement. Bev had begged again that morning to just pack up their things and leave, and Miriam had again told her no.

“So why are we here?” Miriam demanded by way of greeting. “You better not be wasting our time.”

“No time wasted, I guarantee,” Will said, a little too cheerfully. “I killed Hannibal last night, like you asked. I’ve got his body sitting in a bathtub right now, for you two to inspect.” He looked at Bev and grinned. “Hard evidence.”

“Then lead the way, and let’s get this over with.”

They walked the short distance to the house in silence, and when they came to a stop in front of the door, Miriam looked up and down the street with dismay. “We walked past here yesterday, on our way to the market. Jesus.”

“Isn’t that funny?” Will remarked, as he unlocked the door and ushered them inside.

“Not really. Where’s the bathroom?”

“This way.” Will lead them up the stairs and into what was apparently the bathroom, but was in reality just a horrorshow of blood spatters and broken mirrors. “There he is. Look at him. He’s dead.”

Hannibal’s body was crumpled up in the bath, lying in a shallow pool of blood. His skin was cold and pale, and it didn’t bounce back when Miriam pushed her fingers against it.

He looked small in the tub, arms crushed up against his chest and legs folded at an odd angle. It seemed absurd to Miriam that this inert lump of flesh and bone had been the cause of so much grief; people spoke of the Chesapeake Ripper as they might speak of the Devil himself, and yet here he was, apparently dead like any other mortal man.

She held her hand in front of Hannibal’s slackened mouth, and counted out sixty seconds. Then she took his wrist and felt for a pulse. No breath. No beat.

It was too easy, and Miriam mistrusted it instantly.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re playing with us.”

For a long moment, Will said nothing. He looked from Miriam to Beverly, at their drawn faces and the sag of their shoulders. He couldn’t blame them for trying, just as he couldn’t blame the sun for rising or the stars for wheeling in the sky. Their journey here was inevitable, their attempt to finish this was inevitable, and Will’s countermove was, like dominoes falling one after the other, inevitable. It was who they were. They were all doing the only things they knew how to do.

“Always,” Will said, and then Hannibal rose.

There was one horrible, sickening moment where it seemed to Will that he had failed yet again, that Hannibal was just caught in the throes of the blood that brought him back from death, and that soon enough the effects would wane and disappear as quickly as they had begun, to leave him a weak and powerless human once again. But as time stretched and slowed and stopped, Will stared wildly at the mirrors that lined the walls, at the pinking of Hannibal’s skin and the unfurling of his limbs, and then he felt it: the soul-deep pull, the ancient, howling call of like to like, of blood to blood. Hannibal was changed.

Time suddenly came crashing back up to speed, and everyone was moving at once: Miriam, desperate and unthinking, lunged for Hannibal, while Bev tried to grab at her arm and pull her back. Hannibal spun to face them, hands already coming up ready to fight and fangs sliding out ready to bite. But Will could move faster than any of them, and he got to Hannibal first. He scooped up one of the large blood-stained towels from the floor and flung it over Hannibal’s head, then clamped his arms around Hannibal’s arms and chest and pulled him backwards from the tub.

Miriam shoved Bev away and vaulted across the bath, frantically trying to get a hold of the towel and drag Hannibal back. Everything else in her field of vision blurred and faded away until the only thing she could see was Hannibal, struggling against his restraints as Will hauled him out of the door and out of reach. They couldn’t be allowed to make it out of the house. Miriam couldn’t bear the thought that she might fail, that she would have to live the rest of her life with not just Hannibal rattling around inside her head, but Will too; the true horror of what he was capable of would twist up with the memory of the quiet man who sat in her office until she couldn’t separate one from the other and the whole of her mind was tainted with it.

She screamed then, long and loud, a sound of utter desperate refusal. This couldn’t be the end, it _wouldn’t_, she would chase them to the ends of the fucking earth if she had to, and she was already closing in, skidding on the smooth parquet floor of the hallway, she just needed to go a little faster, grasp a little harder, catch them and stop them and get them out, out, _out_\--

The floor suddenly came rushing up to meet her, and Miriam found herself pinned face down and thrashing beneath two strong arms and a shaking, sobbing body.

“Get _off_, Bev, I can still get them, I can still _win_\--”

“Stop! Please! Stop it!” Bev cried, digging her fingers harder into Miriam’s flesh and forcing her body back against the floor when she tried to rise. 

“But I need to-- I have to--”

“No! No more! I can’t keep doing this, Miriam, I can’t, it’s too much, you’re too much…” She pushed her forehead against Miriam’s nape, and her tears fell freely onto the skin of her neck. “I don’t recognise you. Where have you gone?”

“I’m here,” Miriam said, though she wasn’t sure if even believed the words herself.

“No you’re not. They took you and I can’t get you back. You don’t want to come back.” Bev loosened her grip, and then rolled off of Miriam entirely and just lay on the floor next to her, staring up at the ceiling through a film of tears. “I could’ve dealt with the rest of it. The shit I saw in his basement. The fact that my colleague was a fucking… fuck! A fucking _vampire! _I could’ve done the therapy. The mandatory time off. I would’ve signed any non-disclosure they slapped in front of me and then I would’ve got on with pulling their claws out of my skin one by one and just leaving it all in the fucking dust.” Bev wiped the back of her hand roughly over her eyes and took a huge, gasping breath. “But Hannibal sank his claws into you, and then Will sank his in right alongside. You never even tried to pull them out. They were in there so long, you were scared who you would be without them. You got them hooked right round your heart.” 

And then Miriam began to cry, silently, two or three salt tears that welled up and fell to the floor to soak into her hair. It was the first time she’d cried in years, but it didn’t feel like a release, didn’t feel like anything at all except more of the same flat, dull ache that had been inside her all this time. Speaking into the floor, so muffled that Bev could barely hear it, Miriam said, “He kept me for so long, and then one day he just threw me back into the world. It didn’t mean anything to him. He cut my arm off for fun. I convinced myself there must be some reason _why_, but there wasn’t. I was just a footnote in his story. Why can’t I let him go?”

Bev curled around Miriam’s quietly heaving body, and they lay there on the floor together well into the evening. When eventually they moved, neither had the energy to make it back to their hotel room. They spent the night in Hannibal and Will’s house, swaddled in blankets on the living room floor, the dark panelled walls and the heavy stench of blood closing in around them to swallow them whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can i get three massive cheers for theseavoices and her amazing version of boticelli's birth of venus???? i am truly shooketh.
> 
> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1202658507046170624), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/952726), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/189494666554/playing-dead-chapter-6)
> 
> you can find theseavoices and her beautiful work on [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSeaVoices/pseuds/TheSeaVoices), [twitter](https://twitter.com/TheSeaVoices), and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/TheSeaVoices) for uncensored art; as well as [tumblr](https://theseavoices.tumblr.com/), [instagram](https://www.instagram.com/theseavoices/), and [facebook](https://facebook.com/theseavoices)!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we are, finally, at the end of the story which started all the way back in Playing God. thank you to all who came on this journey with me: my friends who supported me while i was writing, theseavoices who provided the most beautiful illustrations i've ever seen, and everyone who read, kudos'd, or commented.
> 
> if you'd like some end credits music i have TWO options for you: [The Big Unknown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4H9T3iFfWg) by Sade, or [The Spoils](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r31DFrFs5A) by Massive Attack - these songs were the cornerstones of my writing playlist for this fic

Bev found sleeping on a train to be near impossible, despite the exhaustion she felt in every bone and muscle of her body. Miriam seemed to have no such troubles, but perhaps it was just that she’d pushed herself to the limit and had no option but to immediately pass out in their little cabin. The carriage rocked back and forth as the train hurtled along the tracks and through the night, and coupled with the frantic whir of Bev’s thoughts, she knew that she was not going to get any rest.

She got up and went to sit in the tiny chair by the window. They would be arriving in Avignon tomorrow. Miriam had identified it as one of a few likely stopping points for Will and Hannibal on their race out of Italy. Bev didn’t know how she had come to this conclusion, and she didn’t want to know. It was as if they’d never left home, Miriam with her nose buried in her laptop and Bev stuck on the outside looking in. She no longer had the strength to try and talk Miriam out of it. She knew in her heart that they were breaking apart at the seams. All she could do was sit and wait to see if they would make it to Avignon in one piece.

It quickly became too much to be shut up in the tiny cabin with only her own anxious thoughts for company, so Bev left the cabin as quietly as she could and headed for the back of the train. There was a small balcony there, open to the air and deserted at this hour, and Bev breathed deeply as she stepped out onto it. The tendrils of her hair were immediately picked up by the wind, and for a long moment she just stood there, eyes closed, letting the coolness of the night sink into her skin.

The door behind her clicked gently, and then Will was standing with her on the balcony.

Bev waited for the cold, sick feeling to arrive, or the boiling anger, or the impetus to fight or flee. But there was nothing left for her to feel beyond the hollowness of exhaustion.

“Have you come to kill us?” she asked.

“I thought about it,” Will said. “I was of two minds walking through the train. Trying to decide if it would be a kindness.”

“Did you come to a conclusion?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to die, Beverly?” There was no threat in Will’s voice, just a quiet curiosity. It was almost worse, somehow.

“No, I-- I don’t want to die. But sometimes I wish I was already dead.”

“I’ll take it away, if you ask me to.”

Bev turned from Will to lean her elbows against the railing, and stared out into the dark. “Why didn’t you do it when Miriam first asked? You could’ve saved us all so much pain.”

Will moved to lean next her, careful inches between them. “I thought she was my friend, and she thought I was a particularly clever pet. I felt betrayed by her. But I suppose I wasn’t thinking too clearly about a lot of things at that point in time.”

“Almost sounds like human feelings,” Bev said, with a humourless half-smile.

“Almost,” Will agreed.

They stood in silence for a while, side by side, as the train bore them on through the night. Bev wondered how she had never noticed before that Will looked so profoundly un-human. It was easy to blend him in with everyone else when he was in a crowd, when she could subconsciously take their human characteristics and apply them to Will, give him warm skin and a breathing chest and reflexive little twitches. Now, on the balcony in the middle of the night, he looked like a marble statue that had been standing out there for centuries.

“I really hoped this could be it, you know. That clean break that Miriam kept talking about. She was so deep inside her own head, suffocating… If we could just cut through all the bullshit and let her _breathe_ again…” Bev picked at a slim splinter of wood on the railing, and flicked it out into the night. “Guess I misjudged.”

“I’ve found that clean breaks rarely live up to the hopes of the people pursuing them. No matter how brutally you cut it out, you will always carry a piece of trauma with you. Miriam did a good job of pretending like she was past it.”

“I wish she hadn’t,” Bev said. “How did Hannibal react? When you first told him what you are.”

Will stared at the train tracks, at the bright flash of metal quickly disappearing into the dark. “He blinked, twice. Then he just accepted it.”

“Must’ve been nice.”

“Yeah. It was.”

Beverly was silent for a long while. She was lovely in the moonlight, her dark hair tangling in the wind and her skin touched with the blue glow of the stars. Will could see it easily enough, what could’ve been were he the human that Beverly had believed in: a friendship, stuttering at first but becoming more comfortable by the day; pancakes and bacon at an early-morning diner, case files spread over the table, black coffee and black humour to help wake them up; cookouts in the summertime, and maybe a drunken kiss, once, twice, but nothing would really come of it, and he would encourage her to pursue Miriam because he knows they would be good together. 

But it was someone else’s life. Impossible to hold on to, unthinkable to have. 

“Is there any way forward?” Beverly asked.

“You could let us stay dead. We would disappear into the world somewhere, and we wouldn’t try to find you. We could avoid America entirely, until you’ve both passed on from this life. It can be easy.”

“It’s never easy.”

“No, it’s not.” Will covered Beverly’s hand with his own. It was the first time they’d ever touched, and she flinched. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

“You and Hannibal have sucked so much of the joy out of my life. You take and take from everyone around you whether you mean to or not. Your presence is like a black hole. I feel so hollow.” She turned her hand in Will’s grip, and clasped his fingers with her own. “Make it stop now. Please.”

Will drew Beverly into his arms. He had given up apologising a long time ago, and couldn’t fathom it now as something that he might ever reasonably do again, but he understood in that moment what moved people to apologise over and over as they repeated the same mistakes throughout their lives. For such short-lived creatures, words were important; the world was so harsh, and humans were so tender and small. There was no time between birth and death for them to thicken their skin. Apologies were all they had.

They remained there, on the dark little balcony at the back of the train, for a long time. Eventually Bev took Will’s hand again, and led him back inside the train.

In the cabin, Miriam stirred in her sleep, the spill of her hair shifting pale across the pillow. Will perched gently on the edge of her bunk, and laid a cool hand on her cheek.

“Miriam,” he whispered, soft as anything.

She made a small irritated noise, and her brow creased slightly, and then her eyes fluttered halfway open. “Will?” she said, still mostly asleep.

“Yes. You’re having a dream, Miriam. Can you open your eyes further?”

“I don’t… I’m asleep…”

“Yes, you are. But you can open your eyes. Try it.” Miriam’s eyelids were heavy and kept falling shut, until eventually she managed to open them and keep them open. Her eyes were unfocused and wandering, but then Will delicately tilted her head and caught her gaze with his own, and her eyes didn’t stray any further. “That’s good. You’re still asleep, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Miriam said, and her voice was small and far away.

“I’ve come to say goodbye. And… to say thank you, for taking care of me, in the best way you were able. Keep your eyes on me, now.”

Will leaned very close to Miriam’s face, speaking softly against her skin for what felt like an eternity. And then it was done, and her eyes drifted closed, and she turned beneath the sheets and slept on.

Will turned to Bev, who was sitting on the tiny armchair that was the only other seat in the cabin. She’d raised the blind to gaze out of the small window at the dark rushing trees, not wanting to see Will do whatever it was that he had to do.

“Are you ready?” he asked, and Bev just nodded. Will came to stand before her, and tilted her head just as he had with Miriam. 

“Will it hurt?” Bev asked, and felt immediately foolish for doing so.

Will smiled. “No. There’s no pain, and it will be over very quickly.” He knelt down, so his eyeline was level with Beverly’s, and then began to speak in a low, hypnotic tone. “You’re on a train, Beverly, heading out of Italy. You’re on holiday with your girlfriend. You both work so hard, and you needed a break…”

Quietly, carefully, Will rewrote Beverly’s life.

There was a brief disturbance in the air, as if someone had suddenly left the room, and Bev looked up from her aimless gaze through the window. She hadn’t realised how difficult it would be to sleep on a train, the constant rocking and rumbling of the wheels jolting her awake so many times throughout the night. Miriam seemed to have no problem with it; she was sound asleep, fingers curling in contentment against the sheets.

Bev sighed and got up to cross the small cabin. If she was going to be awake, she might as well be awake in bed instead of awake in a small and not-particularly-comfortable chair. She climbed carefully beneath the sheets of the narrow bunk, and drew Miriam close with an arm around her waist. They would arrive in Avignon tomorrow. Bev thought of the ancient city streets she wanted to walk down, the lazy flow of the Rhône glittering in the sunlight, and the café where they might stop and drink wine at lunchtime. It was a good thought, and she found herself smiling as she slipped imperceptibly into sleep.

***

Several carriages along, Will returned to his own cabin. 

“It’s done?” Hannibal asked. He was sitting in almost exactly the same position that Beverly had been, in the tiny chair by the tiny window, moonlight spilling across his face just as it had spilled across hers.

“It’s done,” Will said. 

“Then we’re free to move onwards as we see fit.”

“For the most part. I think it would be prudent to avoid America for a while.”

Hannibal smiled, eyes and teeth flashing in the dark. “As you say. We have all the time in the world, after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> follow the links to find this chapter on [twitter](https://twitter.com/zachary_bosch/status/1205184668154368001), [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/969915), and (grudgingly) [tumblr!](https://zacharybosch.tumblr.com/post/189630042854/playing-dead-chapter-7-final)


End file.
